Comment by maest
2 days ago
> even if their recommendations on baby sleep are impossible
If you put yourself in their shoes, you realise that you have to give advice for the 10-20th percentile parents (or worse) because you are giving the same advice to everyone.
The alternative would be to offer more complex advice such as "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", but the perception is that's too difficult for people to follow.
So you end up making very defensive (and therefore onerous) recommendations.
An interesting fact is that, since the introduction of the "baby sleeps on their back, alone", SIDS has gone down, but flat heads have gone up. It's probably been a good tradeoff, but it's still a tradeoff.
Also, I've seen a second time mother refer to "don't cosleep" advice as "western nonsense" which I found funny because it puts things in perspective - vast swathes of the world think cosleeping with your child is safe, natural and normal.
I wonder whether we're trending towards a high-sensor variation of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" / Vannevar Bush's Memex that ingests the details of a user's daily life (the smart glasses being a primitive first example products of such) and identifies salient information in their lives can help us perform mass customization of instructions into direct prescriptives, with backing evidentiary data for SME's. Instead of "if X Y and Z then do A, if only X do B", the interaction becomes "do this, anticipate that outcome" to the user, and if an SME (a doctor in your example) asks about it, the system recalls and presents all the factors that went into deciding upon the specific prescriptive.